Unemployment officially remains steady

As I expected, the official unemployment numbers showed little change from last month. The big spikes in private-sector unemployment came at the end of September. The government’s statistical collection period ends in the middle of the month, however, so all of that was missed by the official number. And today’s release is the last one prior to the election.

Still, it can’t be said that this is a good number, with the official rate hovering at 9.6%.

My personal calculation of the unemployment rate, using the historical average of labor force participation, shows the rate of unemployment also holding steady at 13.2%.

Don’t you mean “FUNemployment”? Just think of how many millions of our fellow Americans, freed from the burdens of having to labor to fill the already swollen money bags of Wall Street robber barons, are enjoying the boon of total, unfettered leisure at this very moment. Why, I don’t see why anybody would regard 10% – nay, 50% – funemployment as a bad thing!

/ sarc

OK, perhaps not quite so much sarc.

1. Only about 50% of our adults pay federal income tax as it is, so whether they are employed or not doesn’t make much difference to government revenues, which, as we know, is the raison d’etre of private sector jobs;

2. More importantly, why do we need a private sector workforce at all? We’re printing / borrowing so much money that we might as well go whole-hog and, rather than go through the farce of collecting taxes from a shrinking number of people, completely fund our government in such a manner (indeed, this seems to be the goal in DC these days). A free-range chicken in every pot and an funemployment check in every mailbox! Anyway, most of those private sector jobs have pernicious effects such as creating pollution (thank heavens we’ve all but eliminated the filthy steel industry in our country; when we’ve gotten rid of Big Oil, we’ll at last be firmly on the road to a clean environment!) or, at the very least, financing the consumerism that is the root cause of our economic malaise.